BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Indiana University's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR) are teaming up later this month to help large National Science Foundation projects address their cybersecurity needs.

Randy Butler

The Oct. 26 event, to be held at Chicago's O'Hare Hilton Airport, marks the first follow-up to the successful Scientific Software Security Innovation Institute Workshop that took place in August 2010.

"This workshop will further refine the requirements of science and engineering for trusted cyberinfrastructure, addressing the protection, integrity, and reliability of research software, computing systems, and data," said Randy Butler, associate director of the Cybersecurity Directorate at NCSA.

Attendees will include representatives of the scientific research community and cybersecurity experts, with the ultimate goal of determining how cybersecurity services can best be applied to make NSF cyberinfrastructure more secure and how such an effort would relate to cybersecurity research, other cybersecurity and cyberinfrastructure projects.

"The goal of the workshop is to identify cybersecurity needs of large NSF science and engineering projects," said CACR Deputy Director Von Welch. "We want to discern what cybersecurity services would be most useful to these scientific projects, so that they can worry less about the security of the project and focus on their scientific research."

A report capturing the workshop discussions and conclusions will be available from NCSA and CACR, and will include the community needs and merits of potential models for a effort to address the NSF science community's assurance and security needs.